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CPATEMENT 


GIVEN BEFORE 


AT 


WASHINGTON, D. C. 
FEBRUARY: 14, 1914 


BY 


J. B. WHITE 


KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI 





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https ://archive.org/details/statementgivenbeOOwnhit 


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The Chairman: Captain, just state what Ree CON+» 
cerns you are connected with. 


Mr. White: _I am in the lumber business in Kansas 
City, Missouri. 


Mr. Chairman, I feel honored to be asked to appear 
before this Committee, but I want to state here that I am 
not appearing here as a lumber representative. I am known 
to the Forestry Department of the United States and to all 
conservationists because I have been, in my weak way and 


manner, working for conservation. I have not been working 


for dollars primarily. I have thought more of trying to 
serve the public than I have of making dollars for myself. I 
am sorry to say that, because I am down on this committee 
as one of a millionaire committee that has come on to speak 
to you gentlemen. I think I am sufficiently well known; 
I do not think there is a forester in the United States but 
will back me up. 


Mr. Covington: This committee does not think it any 
discredit to be an honest millionaire. 


Mr. White: I have spent a great deal of time in the 
cause of conservation, and I have made two trips to Europe 
to better inform myself, and feel that I have yet very much 
to learn. 


I came here a number of years ago to see the Forester 
of the United States, Mr. Pinchot—I think some fifteen 
years ago—after I had corresponded with the Forestry De- 
partment and had made exhibits at different expositions 
under the direction of Mr. Pinchot’s predecessor, Mr. Fer- 
now, and of Dr. Mohr, the Government’s forest expert at 
Mobile, Ala. I wanted to do something to save our timber. 


I began lumbering in Missouri thirty-four years ago. 
My publicly expressed wish for conservation is what brought 
me before the conservationists of the United States, more 
prominently than my ability merited. I was urged by the 
Chief Forester of the United States and by Dr. Schenk, who 
had started the first forestry school at Biltmore, at Ashville, 
N. C., to try to get the lumbermen interested in conserva- 
tion, to stop the enormous waste that was going on all over 
the country wherever lumber was made. I went into Mis- 
souri and bought some timbered lands. I bought a saw- 
mill, organized a company, and estimated my timber, accord- 
ing to grades then marketable. I did not intend to pay for 
any more than I could sell. I found, as I thought, about 
2,000 feet per acre that was all I could sell the way they 


Ary 


were scaling and selling lumber in St. Louis, Chicago and 
other cities. The grades of Yellow Pine were clear, common 
and culls, that left half of the lumber in the woods. That 
is all that would sell—‘‘clear,” “common” and “culls.” The 
culls we do not get much for. They constituted what are 
now the three grades known as No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 com- 
mon. When I cut the trees down and found I was only get- 
ting 2,000 feet per acre, and I was leaving 2,000 
feet per acre more on the ground, I felt that 
there was a_ great waste, and that I would like 
to prevent that waste. This was over thirty years 
ago. I called a meeting of the lumbermen and we 
discussed this matter of waste at a meeting at Poplar Bluffs, 
Mo. We adjourned to Little Rock, Arkansas, and organized 
what we called the Missouri and Arkansas Lumber Asso- 
ciation. Then I got a grade called “Star” adopted. I de- 
cided that we could not afford to be robbed by the lumber 
trade of the cities. The condition was exactly like this: 
When I went to Missouri I visited many mills and saw 
printed on the lumber piles the names of lumber commission 
men from St. Louis and Chicago who owned that lumber. 
They had advanced the money to build many of these mills, 
and the lumber had to be shipped to them at prices they 
named and when that lumber was shipped and received, 
they made various deductions, for interest, for inspection, 
for switching charges and for freight, and for culls and for 
shortage. We had to pay these charges, and if there was 
anything left, we were more or less fortunate. This was 
nearly thirty-four years ago. I had shipped largely to a 
St. Louis firm and I called at their office and met one of 
the firm and said, ““Mr. P., I came up to see if I can settle 
our account. There is a great difference in the amount of 
money that is coming to me and the amount of money in the 
statement you have rendered.” He said: “Just step into 
the other room and I will talk to you in a few minutes.” I 
stepped into the other room and picked up a paper. The 
door was open. Another gentleman came in and he said: 
“Mr. P., I wish you would tell me why you did not give 
me an opportunity to inspect that last cargo of lumber.’ 
He said: “Jim, I do not think you did right by me, and I got 
Jones to inspect that lot of lumber. I like Jones’ inspection 
much better than I do yours.” 


I saw what I was up against. I settled the best I could. 
The office of Lumber Inspector was a political office in St. 
Louis, and many other cities. The Mayor appointed the in- 
spectors, and he appointed those that the lumber board of 
trade wanted and would recommend. He would not have 
any other means of knowing, of course, and if they did not 


inspect to suit the lumber dealer, he called some other in- 
Spector. 


That was the beginning of our lumber association. We 
adopted rules of classification and grading of the various 
qualities of lumber for different uses, so as to try to create 
a market for the entire tree and prevent waste. We de- 
- cided we would never sell lumber upon city inspection, but 
that we would have association inspectors, who were judges 
of lumber, to settle all claims, that they should settle ac- 
cording to established grades. The lumber manufacturers 
won, and the inspection of lumber has for twenty-five years 
been done by competent lumber association inspectors. 


The first year I made a number three, my stockholders 
said: “Why, here, you are losing money. You only get $1.50 
a thousand net out of that number three, and it has cost 
$4.00 or $5.00togetitin the mill.’’ We did lose money. I said, 
“Gentlemen, we will make that number three find a market 
later.”’ The lumber finally went up, although for ten years 
we never had a dividend. Every dollar we got we paid out 
for labor. But finally we got number three up to a price 
where it brought $6.00 to $7.00 a thousand at the mill, which 
just about paid the cost of bringing it into the mill and cost 
of manufacture. I am telling you briefly how we began. 
Notwithstanding that, we finally got so we could market our 
‘number three, and now we are trying to save our number 
four grade. There is still twenty to twenty-five per cent 
left in the woods, because it will not sell for the cost of 
manufacture. 


We want, in the interest of conservation, in the inter- 
est of the public welfare, to save this grade, which conies 
from the top log in the tree. In this I am not speaking as 
the representative of manufacturers of lumber. It is for 
their immediate interest to cut and manufacture only such 
grades as bring a good profit. But I am Chairman of the 
Committee on Conservation of the National Lumber Manu- 
facturers’ Association of the United States, and also Chair- 
man of the Conservation Committee of the Yellow Pine As- 
sociation of the South. I have held these positions for a 
long time, and I have tried to preach conservation in the 
interest of all the people and to save for the benefit of both 
the consumer and the manufacturer. I felt I had a mis- 
sion to do, and that it was a duty to urge this economy upon 
the lumbermen, and try to get them to conserve, for this 
generation and for future generations, and that if we do not 
get anything at first but just the cost of saving it, it is our 
duty to do it. It is a sin to let one-third or twenty-five per 
cent of your product lie in the woods and rot. It takes a 
lifetime to grow a tree, and by saving it all, we furnish 


cheap lumber for the poorer man, and cheap lumber for 
ordinary purposes and eventually it will pay in the increased 
price and the increased yield per acre and in the increased 
life of the plant, and the money saved to labor, to transpor- 
tation companies, and to the consumer, would make curtail- 
ment a duty, even if it increased the cost of the better grades 
to the rich consumer, in order to make it possible to bring 
in the lower grades for the benefit of the poorer consumer. 
We are getting no more for lumber today than I got in 1880 
in Missouri, because in 1880 I sold all I could market, which | 
was the Clear and some Number One Common. Only two 
grades. 


Now I have added to that the number two and the 
number three, and we are trying to make a market for 
number four, and with these four grades the average price 
to the consumer is no greater than it was in 1880. 


Gentlemen, this may astonish you, but I can demon- 
strate this fact, from my books and old price lists, and I 
can show it by the books of my customers. It is true 
I got for the upper grades a good price because the upper 
grades were particularly wanted. If they could buy heavy 
joist and clear lumber at $15.00 to $18.00 a thousand and 
$10.00 a thousand at the mill for the lower grade, that was 
low enough. They did not want anything cheaper. They 
did not want lumber with knots. I issued a little pamphlet 
showing that a consumer could use the grades of knotty 
lumber for hog and calf pens, for cheap fencing and sheath- 
ing on houses and for many other purposes and save money, 
and we finally got them to do it. We sold it to them at a 
price that was low enough so that it brought the average 
price down, so that it does not cost a western farmer any 
more to build a house out of lumber, if he will carefully se- 
lect the lumber according to the uses he wants it for, than 
it did in 1880. He does not pay any more for that house 
in his lumber bill than he did in 1880. But he uses in many 
places a poorer, though just as durable grade of lumber. 


How can we conserve our forests if we permit these 
top logs to lie in the woods and rot? On the Pacific Coast 
they are forced to commit a greater waste, for they are leav- 
ing thirty-five to forty per cent of their fir trees on the 
ground to rot. 


The point is if we can go to a commission and say: 
“Too much lumber is being manufactured, and we can no 
longer sell our low grades, and we are forced to leave a 
great part of the tree in the woods to rot. Can you in the 
interest of the public welfare, grant us a privilege to agree 
on curtailment of production, until normal market condi- 


tions are restored?” If we can get this relief at the proper 
time, then we can be saved, and the country saved from this 
wasteful evil. Is there any way that we can get a law that 
will help us to conserve this timber? It is being done in 
Europe. For there no waste is permitted, manufacturers 
of lumber there have a plan of co-operation under govern- 
ment control, whereby they agree to practice forestry and 
lumbering under the government rules. In some places 
they do not pay any taxes until they harvest their timber 
crops. I notice one of the members of this committee is 
from New Hampshire. I have looked over some of the for- 
ests of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont, and 
have manufactured lumber in Pennsylvania, and they are 
more nearly doing what we in the South and West want to 
do, but they are close to a market; they do not even have 
an edger in a saw-mill. They saw the logs up alive, as we 
term it. They put a log on the saw carriage like they do 
in Europe and saw the log up without turning. They do not 
edge the lumber. It goes to the shop and is trimmed and 
cut up most economically for different purposes. There is 
little waste. They are close to the great consuming cen- 
ters. Out in the West we cannot pay the freight on the long 
haul to market on that cheap lumber. 


It costs just as much to saw a knotty board as it does 
to saw one clear of knots. The consumer has always been 
the chooser when lumber is low and he naturally chooses the 
clear upper grades. Fifty years ago he could get what he 
chose, and timber was close to mill or close to stream where 
the logs could be cheaply floated to mill, and so only the 
clear and second clear was cut into lumber and sixty per 
cent or more of the tree was left in the woods, or logged and 
burned in the clearing of the land. Today twenty-five to 
thirty-five per cent is left in the woods to decay and make 
fuel for forest fires. 


Forest conservation is an impossibility unless we can 
get the consumer to use the lower grades, and he will buy 
them only because there is a sufficient difference in price 
between the lower grades and the better grades. In the 
good old days when stumpage was so cheap in price that 
it cut practically no figure in the cost of lumber, and it was 
never thought there would ever be a scarcity, there was no 
_waste as to dollars in leaving two-thirds to three-fourths of 
the tree in the woods; and neither was there waste in ma- 
terial, for they wanted to clear the land anyway. 


But it is different today. The broad prairies of the 
West want our lumber. In the Southland of Yellow Pine, 
stumpage represents one-third or more of the average cost 
of the lumber at the saw-mill. When a tree is cut down it 


should all be used, the poor as well as the best. And there 
must be a difference in price sufficient to make it profitable 
and possible to bring in the top logs to the mills and make it 
into lumber. A lumberman does not want to waste his re- 
sources, he wants to manufacture and sell all that he can 
find or that he can create a market for. 


If the Preisdent will appoint a Commission to decide as 
to what is best for the public welfare in forestry and lum- 
bering, and permit a curtailment when there is an oversup- 
ply of low priced lumber, it will be for the welfare 
of this and future generations. For it is a fact that an over- 
supply of low grade lumber is the cause of all the so-called 
forest waste. If conservation is to be made possible in 
forest products, the lower grades of lumber must be utilized. 
The consumer is largely responsible. If he rejects small 
potatoes and wants only large ones, because there is an over- 
production of potatoes it is not so great an evil, for po- 
tatoes are an annual crop, and the farmers get together and 
plant less potatoes, and more of something else. But with 
lumber, the waste is a Nation’s loss, for there can be but 
one crop of timber in a lifetime. 


The consumer will take lumber only of even lengths, 
that is, 10, 12, 14 and 16-foot lengths, and in widths of only 
4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 inches wide. Here is an opportunity to 
prevent immense waste if we can be permitted to get to- 
gether and agree that we will insist upon odd lengths and 
odd widths being marketed at same price as the even lengths 
and widths, same as is the custom in New England, and 
that we will insist that there be a sufficient difference in 
price between the good and the poor grades to effect 
a saving of the lower values. 


As a lumber association we have tried to assist the 
National Forestry Association, and we have tried to assist 
the government. We bought the first machine for testing 
the strength of timber. We put it up ourselves and gave it 
to the United States Government, and it was finally put in 
the Forestry Devartment of Washington University in 
St. Louis. We raised one hundred and twenty-five thousand 
dollars to endow the Forestry Department of Yale Uni- 
versity, and when the Government appropriation was not 
sufficient to meet all the requirements of the Forestry De- 
partment of the United States, the lumbermen’s associa- 
tion furnished that department with one stenographer for 
three years. We also raised the money in 1907 to buy for 
Government use in the Forestry Laboratory at. Madison, 
Wis., a still for extracting the by-products of differ2nt 
woods, and this machine is now in use in that laboratory. 
We have sent many carloads of logs and timber to this and 


other universities for laboratory tests. For about a twe 
months’ term once each year we have for several years had 
the graduating class of Yale Forestry School, and their pro- 
fessors, in our forests and mills, in Missouri and Louisiana. 
We have also had classes from Nebraska and from Missouri 
State Universities, and also forest students from Corne!!] 
and other universities. The lumbermen have been taking 
an interest in conservation, and we have always responded 
to opportunities to help this cause. 


So I am speaking just simply from a conservation 
standpoint in behalf of the Lumbermen, and as Chairman 
of their Committee on Conservation. If a bill can be framed 
that will give us a Commission, with power to act as to cur- 
tailment when the public welfare demands, this is what 
we want. I went to the Bureau of Corporations when Her- 
bert Knox Smith was in charge of that Bureau, and I said: 
“I am a conservationist; I have been working for a long 
time on this work. I do not want to appear in it if I am 
guilty of violating the Sherman Law and I wish you would 
send someone down to look me over.” I urged him to do 
that. He finally did send two or three men down to my mill 
in Missouri, who spent two or three weeks in looking it over, 
looking at our books and accounts. I turned everything over 
to them. I had them do the same in cur mill in Louisiana. 
Then they wanted to box up a thousand pounds or so of our 
books and send to Washington. I told them to select any- 
thing they wanted and they did so. We wanted this bureau 
to examine our records and our profits. It is to the interest 
of lumbermen to conserve and save everything they can sell 
and everything they can find a profitable market for. We 
will sometime have to grow trees, and the individual or 
the nation will have to pay the cost. If we sell for less than 
cost, we commit waste, and neither the individual nor the 
nation can afford it. They grow trees profitably in Europe; 
Austria is now exporting more lumber than the United 
States, and they grow it all. They are growing as high as 
thirty thousand feet on an acre, and make a net yearly pro- 
fit of as high as six dollars an acre. We are cutting the 
forests that came up in a natural way in the South, and 
if we get ten thousand feet per acre on the average we are 
doing very well. But that same soil ought to produce twenty 
thousand feet per acre, and if new forests are set out 
and carefully tended, we should under best conditions raise 
from trees of seventy-five years growth fully thirty thou- 
sand teet per acre. Here is an economic condition; we are 
committing waste. In the Yellow Pine of the South we 
are wasting fully fifteen hundred million feet per year. We 
are cutting about fifteen billion feet per year, and if we 
say only ten per cent is a dead waste, we are wasting 1,500,- 


000,000 feet a year, and if we could get cost out of that we 
would get $5.00 or $6.00 a thousand out of it, and it would 
fill a want; it would help the people; it would save so much 
lumber to the world, and would be just as good for some 
purposes at a low price, as the higher priced lumber. We 
want to do this. 


Mill men have made their money by increase in the 
value of stumpage. They bought for $1.00 per thousand 
or less and now they have to pay $5.00 per thousand. When 
it was worth $1.00 per thousand or less, and they built their 
mills, they had to buy a large acreage so as to have a fif- 
teen or twenty years’ life, and the stumpage that they 
bought for $1.00 is now worth $5.00 or what they bought 
for $10.00 per acre is now worth $50.00 per acre, and this is 
where some large buyers and manufacturers have made 
their money, and not in the simple process of manufactur- 
ing. 


It is so with the Illinois farmers. lLand they 
bought twenty-five years ago for $10.00 per acre is now 
worth $150.00 per acre. I think that comparatively very 
few have ever stopped to figure up the high cost of compe- 
tition as against the cost of co-operation or to think serious- 
ly enough of the loss to the nation by the cruelty of forcing 
a portion of the public to wear themselves out in poverty, 
in sweat shops and death shops, to enable some Shylock 
competitor to drive his opponent to the wall. Those who 
suffer by competition, and there are many thousands cf 
them, are by necessity very poor consumers of other 
products. 


In the interest of conservation and of the growth and 
preservation of trees, we need intelligent co-operation and 
not wasteful competition. I do not know that I can say 
anything more. I do not know that I can add anything 
further to what Mr. Keith has so ably stated, but I am 
willing to answer any question that I can. 


Mr. Sims: Colonel, as I understand you, you want 
any laws that may be on the statute books now to be so 
amended that under the supervision of this trade commis- 
sion agreements may be made curtailing the manufacture of 
timber to: the actual normal demand for the period over 
which the agreement reaches, so as to make a demand for 
the lumber that is contained in the trees which you may 
cut, and prevent this waste? 


Mr. White: That is the primary object, yes. 


Mr. Sims: Then, of course, your price would have to 


be such as to make it at least cover the cost of this low 
grade lumber? 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. Sims: Right there, it is your theory as a matter 
of course, that the farmer or anyone else would give as 
much for common lumber to make a pig pen out of as it 
was worth, but that. the cheap lumber, the cull lumber, 
would make a pig pen that would serve the purpose just as 
well as if it were made out of mahogany? 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. Sims: And it is the purpose to have that lumber 
now or in the future used, and so limit the output of the 
other grades, as to make a demand for that’? Is that the 
general idea? 


Mr. White: That would be the general effect. I would 
not say I was doing it to increase ag cost. I am not in- 
creasing the average cost. 


Mr. Sims: You want to maintain the price at such a 
level as will enable you to manufacture your number four 
you speak of—the top log? 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. Sims: Without loss? 
Mr. White: That is right. 


Mr. Sims: And then upon an agreement to so manufac- 
ture made with this Commission, with the authority of the 
Commission, that Commission to see that it is carried out, 
the manufacturers then would increase their price by hav- 
ing a limitation of the output? 


Mr. White: That is right. 


Mr. Sims: You want this Commission to have the 
authority to permit them to enter into such an agreement? 


Mr. White: I think the Commission could never do a 
better thing for this generation or for posterity than to do 
that very thing if they have the authority, or if the author- 
ity can be given them. 


Mr. Sims: You want all laws cr provisions to be re- 
pealed or modified to that extent? 


Mr. White: I think it is absolutely necessary. I think 
there is no way of conserving our forests unless we can 
get the cost of conservation, because if we do not get the 
cost of conservation, we will be permitting greater waste 


than we would to allow the top logs to rot in the woods. We 
would be losing money, throwing more money away. I 
suppose under the Sherman Law it is as great a violation to 
agree to lower the price of lumber as it is to increase it. 
I therefore would not want to say that we want to in- 
crease the price. We want to lower the average price to 
the consumer, but that would make necessary the fact that 
we would have to get what it would cost us to manufacture 
and get that lumber to market that is now lying rotting 
in the woods. It is a good deal like a man being in the hos- 
pital and worrying because of an operation he has just had 
done. He is not getting along well because he is worry- 
ing over the cost of the operation. The surgeon says: ‘Oh, 
don’t worry about that. That fellow over there in the cor- 
ner on that cot, he is paying your bill.’ And the surgeon 
sees that the other fellow does pay the bill. It is simply 
getting enough for your lumber so that it will pay to save it, 
_or if necessary the more or less raising of the price of the 
higher grade to the man who is able to pay for having clear 
lumber in his house, raising it even ever so slightly per- 
haps, yet enough so we can afford to bring in the poorer ~ 
grades that the poor man is glad to get to build a home, and 
which he will thus get at a lower price. 


Mr. Sims: In order to make a market for the lower 
grades you necessarily have got to have a relatively higher 
market for the higher grades, or else they would take the 
higher grades in preference. 


Mr. White: Of course you have got to ask more for 
the higher grades. 


Mr. Sims: In order to prevent waste, you have got 
to have a market? 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. Sims: The higher grades must be enough higher 
than the low grades to cause persons to buy the lower grades 
at a lower price? 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. Sims: Although the average of the whole out- 
put would not be increased? : 


Mr. White: Yes, and what the poor man would pay 
would be a great deal lower than the price he would pay 
if there were not any lower grades made. 


Mr. Esch: Conservation, of course, is for the benefit 
of posterity? 


Mr. White: And this generation, too. 


Mr. Esch: To that end are the lumbermen themseives 
doing anything in the way of reforesting their cut-over 
lands? 


Mr. White: They are doing it just as far as they can 
do it. I was appointed by the President to visit a re-for- 
estation scheme in Cass Lake Indian Reservation. I was 
made the personal representative of the President to go 
there and see that the Indians had a square deal. I went 
up and looked it over. There the rule is that at least two 
seed trees shall be left on every five acres, so that these 
trees will reforest the cut-over acres. This is all that is 
necessary, unless one wants to practice intensive forestry 
by close planting. In most cases you can reforest to the 
extent of probably ten thousand feet per acre by just let- 
ting nature take its course and keeping the fires out. But 
reforestation has got to be encouraged by the states in help- 
ful laws. It has got to be done the same as has been done 
in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire and has 
een done in Pennsylvania, New York and Louisiana. 


I went down two weeks ago with my full board of di- 
rectors to turn over our forests in Louisiana to the State 
under a law they have passed that those who shall prac- 
tice forestry and keep the fires out, and do certain other 
things that are required in order to practice forestry in an 
intelligent way, shall pay no taxes for forty years, except- 
ing on the land assessment of one dollar per acre. Let the 
timber stand and grow for forty years and then pay it al- 
together at the time that you cut your timber. Of course 
taxes are like anything else, entering into the cost of manu- 
facture, and are added to the cost of production. 


Mr. Sims: Do you mean they would collect forty 
years’ taxes in one? 


Mr. White: No, it would be strung along as you cut 
the trees. | 


Mr. Sims: You say they remit the taxes for forty 
years. Do you mean they begin to tax at the end of forty 
years, or would they collect the whole forty years of arrears 
then? 


Mr. White: No, they do not collect any arrears. You 
pay a proportionately higher tax, and such a tax as they 
would be willing to assess on lumber. We do not know what 
that would be. In the State of Pennsylvania we would know 
what that would be, because they say in Pennsylvania: 
“You must pay at the end of your growing period ten per 


cent of what your stumpage is worth, and the state will 
carry you for forty or fifty years, if you will pay when 
you cut the trees, ten per cent of what the trees are worth 
when you cut them. 


Mr. Esch: Would the forty year limitation be of any 
value in cypress land? 


Mr. White: I am not acquainted with cypress. I am 
cutting pine altogether. 


Mr. Esch: I understand that cypress is a very slow 
growing tree and forty years would not make any great dif- 
ference in the value of the forest? 


Mr. White: I expect not as much as in pine. Cypress 
grows in swamps and brakes. I know how trees grow in 
the White Pine and Yellow Pine country. I know that they 
grow all the way from say twenty-four inches in fifty 
years down to only ten inches in fifty years. It depends 
altogether on the kind of soil they are on. 


Mr. Esch: Is the exemption from taxation the only 
encouragement which the states give to the owners of cut- 
over lands? 


Mr. White: That is all, except to assist in keeping out 
fires. But I went down, as I started to say, to try to put 
our timber lands under the law of Louisiana. When we 
got there we were told by some Parish representatives who 
have to do with taxation: “‘We do not want to grow a forest 
here. We want you to cut the timber off. We want you to. 
sell the cut-over lands to the settlers. We cannot afford 
to encourage forestry.” Wesaid: “Your state law permits 
it.” They said: “It permits it, but we will have to tax 
your other property. We will have to tax your mills and 
your other property high enough to make up what we would 
etherwise lose.” So the fault is that in the law in Louis- 
iana there is no provision for looking after the counties 
that are timber counties, and giving them some money, or 
lending it to them, out of the state treasury, until they can 
get it back from the taxation in lumber when the time is up. 


Pennsylvania law is different. It has a fund by which 
they make it up to the timber counties. They give the tim- 
ber counties necessary help from another fund. All that 
we think we need now from this Congressional Committee 
would be that a Commission be created with authority 
that when dire disaster was overtaking an industry and 
waste was being committed and millions of dollars were be- 
ing thrown away by that industry, every year, that we 
should be permitted to practice conservation by curtail- 


ing our product. In that way we would give a blessing to 
this generation and to others yet unborn. 


In Connecticut, a special forest tax law exempts for- 
est plantations from taxation for a period of twenty years. 
I understand Massachusetts has a law permitting one to 
deed or sell to the state his forest land, the state to take 
charge of the growing of the trees and giving the right 
to the party to repurchase at the end of a specified term of 
years by paying back to the state the original price paid 
and the cost of planting, interest, etc. I do not know that 
this is the best plan to aid forestry but over three thousand 
acres have already been taken by the state under this 
method. 


Mr. R. B. Stephens: If the associations of lumbermen 
had the right to curtail the product, should not the Commis- 
sion or some Governmental body regulate the practice of 
forestry? For instance, waste goes on-in two ways. You 
leave part of the logs you cut in the woods? 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. R. B. Stephens: Up in New England a great deal 
of waste is going on because of the cutting of immature 
timber. 


Mr. White: Yes. 


Mr. R. B. Stephens: As they have a good market, and 
can sell anything that is big enough to run a saw through 
and get a string of saw dust and two slabs. They cut im- 
mature timber. I have seen a hundred white pine trees on 
one logging sled that did not saw out a thousand feet of box 
wood. There is a good deal of waste going on from the cut- 
ting of immature trees, due to the high prices, and the 
maintaining of a high price in that part of the country. 


Mr. White: I have been up in your New England 
forests, and I have seen that timber cut, and I have in- 
quired what they were getting for it and have found that 
they were making it pay. So I said to myself and to them 
that, if they can make it pay well enough to cut trees when 
they are only twenty years old, nobody can object if they 
grow timber to replace it. I found in Franklin County, 
Massachusetts, they have: mills making birch tent stakes 
for the British Government. They cut birch down to four 
inches in diameter, which they grow on the sides of the 
mountains. 


On the Island of Madeira—so-named Madeira (mean- 
ing forests in the Portugese language) because there used 
to be so much timber there—there are now only small poles 


and they are cut and found to pay the best when they are 
only four inches in diameter. They are harvesting crop 
after crop, and keep these small trees growing. That may 
some time be the case here. Various substitutes are coming 
on in competition with wood. If it pays us to let our timber 
stand for seventy-five or eighty years, if we can get money 
at four and five per cent and favorable tax laws, then we 
are going to let that timber stand and grow. If we have 
got to cut it at the fifty year period, or a shorter period, it 
will be because cost has about caught up with the value. 
It depends upon cost and the market whether we can let 
our trees stand fifty years, ten years or seventy-five years. 


I want to add something else in regard to cutting and 
saving this timber. We cut in the United States forty-five 
billion feet annually. Say we waste only twenty per cent. 
This is nine billion feet annual loss. It is not the timber 
alone that we should save, which we are now losing, but 
there is the loss of the labor of manufacturing it which at 
six dollars per thousand amounts to a loss of fifty-four mil- 
lion dollars annually and then the railroads are interested in 
it because they are losing the freight which will average 
as much as the labor cost or fifty-four million dollars more 
per annum. And the consumer loses as much more by hav- 
ing to pay the higher price for the higher grades. The 
public has its forests destroyed in two-thirds the time it 
otherwise would if the entire tree was utilized and mar- 
keted. So the laborers, railroads, the public and the con- 
eonen lose if we are obliged to leave the top logs in the 

orest. 


Mr. Sims: In other words, the laborer would get just 
as much for manufacturing the low grade as the high 
grade? 


Mr. White: Just exactly. 


Mr. Sims: When they leave the low grade, the out- 
put being less, the employment of labor is less to that ex- 
tent? 


Mr. White: Certainly, or rather, the plant would only 
run ten or twelve years instead of fifteen years if twenty to 
thirty per cent of the low grade logs is left in the woods; 
then labor is only going to get ten or twelve years’ work in- 
stead of fifteen years’ work for his family on that job. And 
it is a permanent loss to the nation and to the world. 


Mr. Willis: Do you advocate the passage of a law 
which will give this Commission authority to regulate the 
output, or the passage of a law that will give the Commis- 
sion authority to permit combinations amongst the manu- 


facturers of lumber, so that they may regulate the output? 
What is your thought on that? 


Mr. White: I would be perfectly willing that the Com- 
mission should directly limit the output. I said that when 
I was here several years ago. I, with other lumbermen and 
foresters, went to see the President and we urged that 
there might be some law by which the Forestry Associa- 
tion of the United States, the Agricultural Department or 
the Forestry Department of the Agricultural Department 
might say just exactly how much we should cut; and thus 
leave the responsibility of committing waste, or of not 
committing waste, to some power that can regulate it. We 
cannot regulate it down there with over thirty thousand 
mills in the South and in the West, unless we can get to- 
gether and agree upon an effective policy. 


Mr. Sims: You would be willing for the Commission, 
if it had the power, to prescribe some rules or regulations 
general in character with reference to how old the timber 
might be before it is permitted to be cut? 


Mr. White: I would be perfectly willing for them to do 
that if they would take all facts and conditions into con- 
sideration. If they would say: ‘“‘Let your timber stand 
until it is twenty-four inches in diameter,’ then I would 
want them to prove to me that it woud pay me better than 
to cut it at sixteen inches in diameter, and perhaps I would 
have to ask a loan of money so that I could afford to let 
the timber stand. But I would have no fear. They would 
be competent and well-informed men on such a Commis- 
sion. 


Mr. Esch: Is what you say equally applicable to the 
hardwood? 


Mr. White: It applies to the hardwood also. It is ap- 
plicable to the Oaks, and to the Beech and all other woods. 
Forestry is practiced in Europe on the Beech, the Maple, 
the Scotch Pine, the Fir and the Oak and other woods, ac- 
cording to soil and climate. There are some woods it does 
not pay to conserve as well as others. We would like to 
save the chestnut, the elm, the yellow poplar and other for- 
est trees which I have mentioned. But the elm and chestnut 
trees are dying. We have not found any way yet of being 
able to stop the ravages of the terrible blight. 


Mr. Esch: Is the use of soft wood for pulp wood 
inimical to the conservation policy? 


Mr. White: No, I do not think it is. I think that the 
use of wood for pulp and the use of wood for lumber has 


got to be practically of the same stumpage value accord- 
ing to age of trees. The only difference is as to the inter- 
est on the money and taxes to let that tree grow from six 
inches in diameter to twenty-four inches in diameter or to 
whatever diameter the tree may be when cut for lumber. 
If it pays best to cut now at six inches in diameter into 
pulp wood, that will of course be done, or the owner would 
be committing waste in that he would not be managing his 
forests wisely for best economic and financial results. 


I thank you, gentlemen, for your kind attention. 


Mr. Willis: Would you favor the extension of such 
regulations as you have indicated to the coal fields, as said 
by the preceding witness? 


Mr. White: I am not interested in coal. I might be 
doing an injustice to my better informed neighbor, but I 
would favor such a policy for the coal fields from my pres- 
ent information. I believe the Government has got to take 
hold of this question of waste for, unaided, we are powerless 
to stop it. 

Mr. Sims: The Committee is very much obliged to 


you. A very distinguished Senator has just died and we 
feel we ought not to continue the session farther today. 


Thereupon the Committee adjourned until Monday, 
February 16th, 1914, at 10 o’clock a. m. 





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